Sunday: Hili dialogue

September 30, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s the last day of September: Sunday, September 30, 2018, and National Mulled Cider Day. It’s also a UN-decreed day: International Translation Day. No me gusta la carne cruda! J’aime les canards! Moj lebdeći brod je pun jegulja!

On this day in 1520, Suleiman the Magnificent became sultan of the Ottoman Empire. In 1791, the first performance of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (die Zauberflöte) took place in Vienna, with Mozart conducting. He died on December 5 of that year at the ridiculously low age of 35. On September 30, 1888, Jack the Ripper killed his third and fourth victims, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.

On this day in 1915 occurred a seminal event in warfare. According to Wikipedia, “Radoje Ljutovac [a Serbian soldier] becomes the first soldier in history to shoot down an enemy aircraft with ground-to-air fire.” It wasn’t a rifle but a cannon that was not designed to shoot down aircraft. Again according to Wikipedia, on September 30, 1922, “The University of Alabama opens the American football season with a 110–0 victory over the Marion Military Institute, which still stands as Alabama’s record for largest margin of victory and as their only 100 point game.”  Exactly five years later, in the miracle year of 1927, Babe Ruth became the first baseball player to hit 60 home runs in a season. That record stood for many years.  Eleven years later, in 1938, it was a day of shame, for on that day Britain, France, Germany, and Italy signed the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to take over the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. That was also the day that the craven Neville Chamberlain proclaimed, “It is peace for our time.”

On September 30, 1941, the Nazis finished up the Babi Yar massacre of Jews outside Kiev: 34,000 were executed. Here’s a short documentary of the massacre:

Thirteen years later, the USS Nautilus was commissioned as the world’s first vessel powered by a nuclear reactor. The submarine is now a museum in Connecticut. Two events occurred on September 30, 1963. First, James Meredith entered the University of Mississippi. Wikipedia says it was September 30, but in Meredith’s bio the date is given as October 1. One day Greg will produce his promised article for this site: “What’s the matter with Wikipedia?”  Second, on that day Mexican-American labor leader César Chávez created the National Farm Workers Association. Are you old enough to remember the grape boycott? Finally, it was 13 years ago today that the Danish Newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of Muhammed, setting the Muslim world aflame. Here’s the page from the paper as reproduced in Wikipedia, which will now cause this site to be banned further:

Oh, and on this day in 2018, Jerry A. Coyne filled out his midterm ballot, as he was scheduled to be in Croatia on Election Day. Pity there was no President to vote for!

Notables born on this day include Hans Geiger (1882), Lester Maddox (1915), Buddy Rich (1917), Deborah Kerr (1921), Truman Capote (1924), Angie Dickinson (1931), and Martina Hingis (1980). Those who died on this day include James Dean (1955), Simone Signoret (1985), Virgil Thomson (1989), Robert Kardashian (2003), and Monty Hall (2017).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili shows typical cat uncertainty:

Cyrus: I’m going in and you can do what you want.
Hili: But I don’t know what I want.
In Polish:
Cyrus: Ja wracam do domu, a ty jak chcesz.
Hili: Właśnie nie wiem czego chcę.

Here’s a True Fact from reader Stash Krod:

All of today’s tweets came from Grania. This first one, a truly remarkable (and authentic) photo, kicks off an entire and hilarious Twitter thread:

This is ineffably sweet: a surgeon sews up a scared little child’s teddy bear and produces a medical report.

We could all use some frisky kittens today:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1045478700282712064

This video is going around, but according to Snopes it isn’t what it looks like:

This is a building that a twelve-year-old boy would design (be sure to watch the video):

A nasty seal!

Make sure to turn the sound on for this video of the very kitten whose voice created the verb “nom”:

https://twitter.com/RelktntHero/status/1013137588645978117

Tom Nichols continues his jeremiad against Kavanaugh.

And two more Kavanaugh-related tweets:

The tweet at issue:

The Dodo is a great source of animal videos. Do watch this one of cat and squirrel BFFs:

 

20 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  2. That building – it just *had* to shoot fireworks out of the end of it, didn’t it?

    It makes you wonder how it is that, in all the time the thing was being designed, there was nobody sufficiently cynical and dirty-minded involved to say “Hey, that looks exactly like…”

    Really, companies should employ someone just to spot unfortunate resemblances like that. I’m available for a small fee…

    cr

      2. I guessed the, errm, tower was probably in Dubai or Singapore, but apparently it’s a medical centre in Guangxi, China.

        Best comment in the Tw*tter thread:

        If you build it, they will come.

        😎

        cr

        1. Sorry, a *media* centre. Which invites a whole different class of jokes. What a mistake-a to make-a.

          cr

  3. On my calendar, today is also World Blasphemy Day – a day to insult deities of all stripes. Take that, Oþinn!

    2. You beat me to the punch. I was about to remind us all that today is International Blasphemy Day. More than just an excuse to be a dick, as I was explaining to my god-believing friend (small g, she’s got kind of a god-lite sort of benevolent deity), it’s very serious business and no joke.

  4. Which one of the seals is the nasty one? The one passing in the foreground slapped first. The second one just slapped back.

  5. I also thought that that picture of Flake looked like a Baroque painting. It needs a docus for his reaction, though, like the head of John the Baptist or a bloody dagger.

  6. Are you old enough to remember the grape boycott?

    I’m old enough to have observed it — I wouldn’t drink Gallo wine in college in the ’70s (which, ok, wasn’t that big a sacrifice since Gallo wines pretty much sucked anyway).

  8. “What’s the matter with Wikipedia?”

    This, for one:

    During Thursday’s emotional hearing with Brett Kavanaugh, the Wikipedia page for Devil’s Triangle briefly changed to reflect the Supreme Court nominee’s answer.

  9. Meredith was brought onto the University of Mississippi campus on Sunday, Sept. 30 and he enrolled as a student on Monday, Oct. 1. This was my second year as a student there. The Mississippi Highway Patrol made no effort to control the gathering crowd. The riot ensued when the MHP officers were withdrawn.

  10. When Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of Muhammed setting the Muslim world aflame,Wikipedia states “[t]he cartoons were reprinted in newspapers around the world both in a sense of journalistic solidarity”. Not so. All major US publications refused to reprint the cartoons. This cowardice encourages more violence.

Comments are closed.